From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Path: main.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: Terje Bless Newsgroups: gmane.emacs.devel Subject: Re: The minibuffer vs. Dialog Boxes (Re: Making XEmacs be more up-to-date) Date: Sun, 21 Apr 2002 03:09:44 +0200 Sender: emacs-devel-admin@gnu.org Message-ID: References: <87elhap2r4.fsf@lgh163a.kemisten.nu> NNTP-Posting-Host: localhost.gmane.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; Charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Trace: main.gmane.org 1019351739 21433 127.0.0.1 (21 Apr 2002 01:15:39 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@main.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Sun, 21 Apr 2002 01:15:39 +0000 (UTC) Cc: Michael Toomim , Eli Zaretskii , bradym@balestra.org, xemacs-design@xemacs.org, emacs-devel@gnu.org Return-path: Original-Received: from quimby.gnus.org ([80.91.224.244]) by main.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 3.33 #1 (Debian)) id 16z5x4-0005Za-00 for ; Sun, 21 Apr 2002 03:15:38 +0200 Original-Received: from fencepost.gnu.org ([199.232.76.164]) by quimby.gnus.org with esmtp (Exim 3.12 #1 (Debian)) id 16z5x3-0005mm-00 for ; Sun, 21 Apr 2002 03:15:37 +0200 Original-Received: from localhost ([127.0.0.1] helo=fencepost.gnu.org) by fencepost.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 3.34 #1 (Debian)) id 16z5wg-0005St-00; Sat, 20 Apr 2002 21:15:14 -0400 Original-Received: from mail.wavelan.no ([217.144.228.111] helo=isa) by fencepost.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 3.34 #1 (Debian)) id 16z5wL-0005NT-00 for ; Sat, 20 Apr 2002 21:14:53 -0400 Original-Received: from [217.144.228.69] by isa (ArGoSoft Mail Server Pro for WinNT/2000/XP, Version 1.8 (1.8.1.1)); Sun, 21 Apr 2002 03:17:20 +0200 Original-To: "Alfred M. Szmidt" X-Priority: 3 In-Reply-To: <87elhap2r4.fsf@lgh163a.kemisten.nu> X-Mailer: Mailsmith Prerelease (Blindsider) Errors-To: emacs-devel-admin@gnu.org X-BeenThere: emacs-devel@gnu.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.0.9 Precedence: bulk List-Help: List-Post: List-Subscribe: , List-Id: Emacs development discussions. List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: Xref: main.gmane.org gmane.emacs.devel:2890 X-Report-Spam: http://spam.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.devel:2890 Alfred M. Szmidt wrote: >* Michael Toomim writes: >>Changing the terminology would help new users, and I think that old >>users would be able to get used to the changes pretty quickly, since >>they'd all be pretty intuitive (assuming they're just being updated to >>the terms commonly used today). > >Seriously, changing the terminology just to help new users is to funny, >if someone wants to learn about the terminology then they should read >the dictionary (it actually exists to be read). Just because someone >doesn't understand what `esophagus' means, doesn't mean that the word >should be changed to something that is more suitable to new people that >are interested in biology. This actually makes my point very well. Since I'm not too find of analogies I won't delve into any long discussion of jargon among peers vs. popular (or populist) science. You choose your level of abstraction based on the vocabulary of your audience. We aren't talking about people interested in "biology" here; we're talking about a patient seeing a doctor. Talking about the implementation and demanding familiarity with terminology is fine for budding Emacs _developers_, but it's (IMO) inappropriate for people who merely want to /use/ Emacs to perform some task. If my doctor told me I had an inflamed pharynx I wouldn't know what the hell he was talking about. A sore throat OTOH is perfectly understandable and is probably accurate _enough_ under the circumstances. -- >For all I know they probably have a standard for >which direction to put the thread on a bolt. That would be ISO 261:1973. -- John Cowan